The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  The gun in his hand moved so that it was aiming at the Collector beneath the table. The first shots would take him in the gut, the last in the back of the head as he fell forward and Louis delivered the coup de grâce from above.

  The Collector gestured with his right hand toward the chair beside him. On it, unnoticed by Angel and Louis, until now, was a green cardboard folder.

  “Open it,” he said, as he restored his hands to the table.

  Louis stood, never taking his eyes from the Collector as he went to retrieve the folder. The two Asian men in the diner moved too, their guns now visible. The Collector remained very still, his gaze fixed on the tabletop before him. He remained like that as Louis flipped through the file. It contained typewritten sheets, photographs, even transcripts of telephone conversations.

  “It’s your history,” said the Collector. “The story of your life—every killing we could trace, every piece of evidence we could accumulate against you. By good fortune, it was one of a handful of records for which Eldritch retained secure copies. There’s enough in there to have damned you, should I have chosen to take the knife to you. If I don’t walk safely out of here today, Eldritch will ensure that a copy of it goes to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York County District Attorney, twelve different police departments throughout the nation, and the Criminal Investigative Division of the FBI. It should fill in any annoying gaps in their own research.”

  For the first time, the Collector relaxed. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “I told you, I’m tired of the hunt,” he said. “It ends now. I could have used this material alone to force you to relent, but I feel that I have to make recompense for what happened to Mr. Garner. I want your promise that the chase is over. I want Cambion. In return, you get vengeance for what happened to the detective.”

  Louis and Angel looked at each other. Louis could see that Angel didn’t want to make a deal with this man, but the file had tipped the scales, and Angel, Louis knew, would agree to whatever protected him. Bringing them closer to those who had carried out the attack on Parker would just have to be considered a bonus.

  “Agreed,” said Louis.

  “If the detective survives, I’ll take it that your word is a guarantee of his good behavior too,” said the Collector. “Otherwise, our truce is void.”

  “Understood.”

  “The couple for whom you’re looking are named William and Zilla Daund. They live in Asheville, North Carolina. They have two sons, Adrian and Kerr. The sons have no idea of their parents’ sideline in killing.”

  “Who hired them?”

  “You’ll have to ask them.”

  “But you know.”

  “I believe the name Daund comes from the northeast of England—Durham, or possibly Northumberland. I’ll let them fill in any other details themselves. Now, I’d like you to fulfill the second part of our arrangement.”

  “Cambion is in Hunts Lane, over in Brooklyn,” said Louis. “Assuming he hasn’t already moved on. He’s holed up in an old apothecary.”

  “Does he have anyone with him?”

  “A big man named Edmund.”

  The Collector stood.

  “Then we’re done here,” he said. “I wish you luck in your investigation.”

  He buttoned his coat and stepped around the table.

  “And you can keep the file,” he told Louis as he passed him. “We have more than one copy now.”

  They let him go, and he lost himself in the crowds on Lexington Avenue.

  “I notice that you didn’t mention the possibility of a third person at Hunts Lane with Cambion and his buddy,” said Angel.

  “No,” said Louis. “I guess it must have slipped my mind.”

  CHAPTER

  L

  I sat at the edge of a lake, on a wooden bench painted white. I was cold, even with a jacket on, and I kept my hands in my pockets to hold the worst of the chill at bay. To my left, at the top of a small hill, was the rehabilitation center, an old nineteenth-century sea captain’s house surrounded by a series of more recently built single-story redbrick buildings. Evergreen trees bounded the lake, and most of the snow had been cleared from the grass. The grounds were quiet.

  All was quiet.

  A small black stone lay by my feet. It looked incredibly smooth. I wanted to hold it in my hand. I reached down to pick it up, and found that it was flawed beneath. A shard of it had fallen away, leaving the underside jagged and uneven. I stared out at the still expanse of the lake and threw the stone. It hit the water and the surface cracked like ice, even though it wasn’t frozen. The cracks extended away from me and across the lake, then fractured the woods and mountains beyond, until finally the sky itself was shattered by black lightning.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and a hand lit upon my shoulder. I saw the wedding ring that it wore. I remembered the ring. I recalled putting it on that finger before a priest. Now one of the nails was broken.

  Susan.

  “I knew that it wasn’t real,” I said.

  “How?” said my dead wife.

  I did not turn to look at her. I was afraid.

  “Because I could not remember how I got here. Because there was no pain.”

  And I was speaking of the wounds left by the bullets, and the wounds left by loss.

  “There doesn’t have to be any more pain,” she said.

  “It’s cold.”

  “It will be, for a time.”

  I turned now. I wanted to see her. She was as she had been before the Traveling Man took his knife to her. And yet she was not. She was both more and less than she once was.

  She wore a summer dress, for she always wore a summer dress in this place. In every glimpse of her that I had caught since losing her, she had been wearing the same dress, although at those times I never saw her face. When I did, it was under other circumstances. The dress would be stained with blood, and her features a ruin of red. I had never been able to reconcile the two versions of her.

  Now she was beautiful once again, but her eyes were distant, focused elsewhere, as though my presence here had called her from more pleasant business and she wished to return to it as quickly as possible.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For leaving you. For not being there when he came for you.”

  “You would have died with us.”

  “I might have stopped him.”

  “No. You weren’t as strong then, and he had so much rage. So much rage . . .”

  Her nails dug into my shoulder, and I was transported with her, back to our home, and together we watched as the Traveling Man had his way with her and our daughter. As he worked, another version of my wife stood behind him, her face a scarlet blur as her head and body shook. This was the one whom I had seen before. This was the wife who walked through my world.

  “Who is she?” I asked. “What is she?”

  “She is what remains. She is my anger. She is all my hatred and my sorrow, my hurt and my pain. She is the thing that haunts you.”

  Her hand stroked my cheek. Her touch burned.

  “I had a lot of anger,” she said.

  “So I see. And when I die?”

  “Then she dies too.”

  The remains of our daughter were stretched across her mother’s lap. Jennifer was already dead when he began cutting. It was, I supposed, a mercy.

  “And Jennifer?”

  I felt her hesitate.

  “She is different.”

  “How?”

  “She moves between worlds. She holds the other in check. She would not desert you, even in death.”

  “She whispers to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “She writes upon the dust of windowpanes.”

  “Yes
.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Close.”

  I looked, but I could not find her.

  “I saw her here, in this house, once before.”

  I had been stalked through these rooms years after their lives were ended, hunted through my former home by a pair of lovers. But my daughter had been waiting for them—my daughter, and the creature of rage she tried to control, but which on that occasion she was content to unleash.

  “I’d like to see her.”

  “She’ll come, when she’s ready.”

  I watched the Traveling Man continue his cutting. There was no pain.

  Not for me.

  WE WERE BACK AT the lake. The cracks and fissures were repaired. The fragile world was undisturbed. I stood by the shore. The water did not lap. There were no waves.

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “I think I want to die.”

  “Then die.”

  I could not see my reflection, but I could see Susan’s. In this world, it was she who had substance and I who had none.

  “What will happen?”

  “The world will go on. Did you think that it revolved around you?”

  “I didn’t realize the afterlife had so much sarcasm in it.”

  “I haven’t had cause to use it in a while. You haven’t been around.”

  “I loved you, you know.”

  “I know. I loved you too.”

  She stumbled over the words, unfamiliar in her mouth, but I sensed that speaking them aloud caused something deep inside her to thaw. It was as though my proximity reminded her of what it had once been like to be human.

  “If you stay here,” she said, “events will play out without you. The world will be different. You will not be there for those whom you might have protected. Others may take your place, but who can say?”

  “And if I go back?”

  “Pain. Loss. Life. Another death.”

  “To what end?”

  “Are you asking me your purpose?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You know what they seek. The One Who Waits Behind the Glass. The God of Wasps. The Buried God.”

  “Am I supposed to stop them?”

  “I doubt that you can.”

  “So why should I go back?”

  “There is no ‘should.’ If you go back, you do so because you choose it, and you will protect those who might not otherwise be protected.”

  She moved closer to me. I felt the warmth of her breath against my face. It bore a trace of incense.

  “You wonder why they come to you, why they’re drawn to you, these fallen ones.” She whispered the words, as though fearful of being overheard. “When you spend time close to a fire, you smell of smoke. These things seek not only their Buried God. They are looking for a fire that they wish to extinguish, but they cannot find it. You have been near it. You have been in its presence. You carry its smoke upon you, and so they come for you.”

  She stepped away from me. Her reflection receded, then disappeared. I was alone. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, my daughter was beside me. She put her hand in mine.

  “You’re cold,” said Jennifer.

  “Yes.” My voice broke on the word.

  “Would you like to go for a walk, Daddy?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like that very much.”

  CHAPTER

  LI

  The Battery Park Book Exchange stood in the center of Asheville, North Carolina. It sold rare and used books, to which Louis had no objection, and wine and champagne, to which, if possible, he had even fewer objections.

  The woman named Zilla Daund was taking part in a book club in the store. She and four other women were discussing Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra over sparkling wine and the kind of single-mouthful treats that passed for food where thin, attractive women were concerned. Louis sat with a glass of Pinot Noir by his right hand and a copy of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg, on his lap. He had picked up the Berg book because Perkins had edited Thomas Wolfe, probably Asheville’s most famous son, and Louis, who couldn’t stand Wolfe’s writings, was trying to understand why Perkins had bothered. As far as he could tell from reading the relevant sections in Berg’s biography, the only reason that Wolfe’s début, Look Homeward, Angel, was even marginally tolerable was that Perkins had forced Wolfe to remove more than sixty thousand words from it. At Louis’s rough estimate, that still left Look Homeward, Angel—which, in the store’s Scribner edition, ran to about 500 pages—at least 499 pages too long.

  Zilla Daund looked like the kind of woman who took reading books very seriously without actually understanding how the act could be enjoyable as well. Her copy of Cleopatra was marked with narrow Post-it notes of different colors, and Louis felt certain that the interior was dotted with words such as “Interesting!” “Agree strongly!” and “VIP!” like a high schooler in freshman year working her way through The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. She was slim and blond, with the build of a long-distance runner. She might even have been considered good-looking had she not prematurely aged herself through a probable combination of excessive exposure to the elements and a steely determination that had left her brow permanently furrowed and her jaw set in a thin rictus, like a serpent about to strike.

  Louis had been watching Daund for the past thirty-six hours, but this was as close as he had yet come to her. It was his way: begin at a distance, then slowly move in. So far, from his brief exposure to her routine, she seemed an ordinary suburban housewife living a moderately comfortable existence. She’d gone to her local gym that morning, training for an hour before returning home to shower and change, then leaving shortly after lunch to come to her book club. The day before, she’d eaten a late breakfast with some friends, shopped at the Asheville Mall, browsed the aisles at Mr. K’s Used Books at River Ridge, and had dinner at home with her husband and their younger son—their older son, a sophomore at George Washington University, being currently absent. The younger son was just sixteen, but he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner anytime soon. At that precise moment, he was in the back of a van being driven deep into the Pisgah National Forest by two men whose faces he had not even glimpsed before he was snatched. He was probably terrified, but the boy’s terror didn’t concern Louis. He wanted something to use against the Daunds if they proved unwilling to talk.

  Meanwhile, Angel was staying close to William Daund, who was on the faculty of the Department of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Louis would have bet a dollar that William Daund had read Look Homeward, Angel so often he could recite passages of it by heart. He probably even liked the book. Louis was looking forward to killing him.

  Zilla Daund finished giving her opinion on Cleopatra’s ruthlessness, which apparently extended to slaughtering her own relatives when the situation required it. “She lived in an age of murder and betrayal,” Daund told her friends. “I don’t believe that she killed because she liked it. She killed because it was the most effective solution to the problems that she faced.”

  The other women laughed—that was their funny old Zilla, always following the shortest route between two points, no matter who or what happened to be in the way—and Louis watched as Daund laughed along with them. The group broke up. Louis returned his attention to Maxwell Perkins. In a letter dated November 17, 1936, ­Perkins was trying to come to terms with the fact that Wolfe was severing ties with him. “I know you would not ever do an insincere thing, or anything you did not think was right,” wrote Perkins to Wolfe.

  Louis had to admire Perkins’s faith, even if he adjudged it ultimately to have been misplaced.

  “He ruined Thomas Wolfe, you know.”

  Louis looked up. Zilla Daund was standing before him,
her copy of Cleopatra cradled beneath her left arm, her right hidden in a pocket of her coat.

  “He did good by Hemingway and Fitzgerald,” said Louis. “Can’t win ’em all.”

  He didn’t allow his eyes to drift to her right hand. He held her gaze.

  “No,” she said. “Maybe you can’t. Enjoy your wine—and your book.”

  She walked away, and Louis thought: She’s made me, or thinks she has. It didn’t matter. If she and her husband were as smart as Cambion and the Collector seemed to think, they must have learned quickly that the private detective they’d tried to kill was different, and that the perpetrators of the attack on him were being hunted not only by the police but by men who weren’t unlike themselves. Perhaps they had simply not expected to be found so quickly, if they were found at all. Louis wondered if Cambion had already warned them.

  He called Angel as he watched her walk across the street to the parking garage.

  “Where is he?”

  “In his office,” said Angel. “He’s been in tutorials since this morning, and he’s about to give a class until four.”

  “If he cancels, call me.”

  “Why?”

  “I think the woman is spooked. If I’m right, she’ll contact him. You know where he’s parked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Watch the car.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll take the house. Stay with the husband. And, hey?”

  “What?”

  “You ever read Look Homeward, Angel?”

  “Fuck, no. It must be a thousand pages long. Why would I want to do that?”

  “I knew there was a reason why I liked you,” said Louis.

  “Yeah?” said Angel. “Well, if I think of one in return I’ll let you know.”

  LOUIS WAS AHEAD OF the woman all the way. He had parked at a meter just outside the store, so as soon as she was out of sight he left cash for his wine and returned to his car. Angel had already taken care of the house alarm earlier in the day, once he was certain that William Daund was committed to his tutorials. It meant that when Zilla Daund entered the house Louis was waiting for her. She said only one word as she set her bag down, Louis’s suppressed .22 inches from her head.